facility focus OPTIMIZING Performance, Productivity And People How best practices, employee training and new technologies drive results in the Duke University Health System. By: Allen Rathey Isaac Johnson, REH, is the resident region-al manager, department of environmental services, with Duke University Health Sys-tem under the auspices of Crothall Health-care Inc., a division of Compass Group North America. In this role, Johnson oversees more than 50 managers and over 600 front-line associates at the 5.5 million square-foot, 1000-plus bed, on-campus Duke Universi-ty Hospital — also known as Duke Univer-sity Medical Center — located in Durham, North Carolina. For more than 20 years, Duke University Medical Center has been named as one of the top hospitals in the U.S. as part of the annual U.S. News & World Report’s Best Hospitals edition. Duke University Hospital is also a well-known, best-practice teaching and learning hospital. The environmental services group under Johnson follows suit, having adopted best practices in information access, cross-training, clean technology and human resources to optimize performance, pro-ductivity, and perhaps most importantly, its people. ■ Perform patient-room Quality Assurance (QA) checks ■ Assess available associates or work-ers on the floor ■ Track patient rooms needing cleaning or attention ■ Deploy workers to different areas ■ Determine how long cleaning or ser-vice takes (“turn times”) I ■ Respond quickly to requests ■ Check e-mail. Freeing the management team from the constraints of a physical office and desk, while providing a detailed and birds-eye view of the entire operation, has improved re-sponse times, productivity and customer ser-vice and eliminated the need to gather in an office to coordinate activities and paperwork. Information Access And Mobility Each of Johnson’s managers has a Micro-soft Surfaces tablet within reach loaded with Epic electronic medical record-keep-ing (EMR) software accessing its “bed-tracking” function. This software enables a mobile, cloud-based virtual office, allowing managers to: Adopting best practices in information access, cross-training, clean technology and human resources optimizes performance and productivity. April 2014 42 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® Image courtesy of VILevi/iStock/Thinkstock
CMM – Archives April 2014: 42
